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Hey Community,
I had these memory issues for quite a while and 5.1.2 supposed to fix it, but surprise: "It did not!!!"
After just half an hour of usage and just visiting about 20 sites, the Safari Web Content process starts
blowing it out again. Any ideas. Before the update it went up to 4GB over a single work day and Swap
used was as high as 9.6 GB.
I'm seeing the same thing. Prior to 5.1.2 the memory leak was major and fast. Now with 5.1.2 it seems to be much slower in leaking, but eventually the Safari Web Content grew to over 1.5 GB with no additional tabs/pages opened.
Back to Chrome I guess...
If you haven't already, try deleting your Safari cache from the Safari menu. It might also be good to delete the cache with an app like Onyx you can get from macupdate.com or download.com
Also try deleting "com.apple.Safari.plist" from:
/yourusername/Library/Preferences/
Let me know if that helps at all. 🙂
Hey Cowicide,
done that already to no effect. Safari sill blows it.
As reported by dnimtz, the whole issue appears slower progressing, but it still adds up. After a whole workday I was at 4GB again. I have deactivated paging, so it did not move things out of RAM and slowed everything down, but I was close to have my RAM filled (278MB free out of 8GB) with Safari accounting for almost 5GB for all related processes.
I have found a nice way to demonstrate this memory leaking:
1st - Open activity monitor and sort it by Real Memory highest first
2nd - Open Safari and run the sun spider suite: http://www.webkit.org/perf/sunspider-0.9.1/sunspider-0.9.1/driver.html
3rd - watch the Safari Web Content eating up your RAM in Activity Monitor
in the time I wrote this, it is already up to 1.76GB and still hungry
even after closing the tab with the spider, it remains high with a constant 1.49GB
Safari has hogged memory since before time began, so Apple's claim that Safari 5.1.2 fixes the Safari memory leak problem means nothing. I'll believe it when I see it.
Just had an epiphany! I've bean on some sites recently (since upgrading to Lion) where I realized that the page keeps on spreading and spreading horizontally to no end (for example: http://www.dailyblogtips.com/social-bookmark-buttons/ you can see the horizontal scrollbar shrinking to the left) this is likely due to a bug in the social bookmarking code. When visiting such a page you can clearly see the memory of "Safari Web Content" jumping through the sky, apparently the page keeps on speading ad-infinitum and taking your moemory for a ride with it!
Update: this is actually a problem with AllPagesZoom extension in Safari, after turning it off, it no longer happens. 😊
After reading a few pages of posts on this subject, I decided to quit Safari Web Content and it mostly stableized the memory. CPU has stopped climbing the tower display I have on my desktop. We'll see how long this lasts. I've had other issues with Web Content crashing Safari.
As others have said, I've never seen Safari handle memory well, since 2003 with my first Mac.
This is better than iFreeMem for regaining RAM. And cheaper.
Running Snow Leopard 10.6.8 on a late 2009 Mac Mini. Skipping Lion as I did with Tiger. No value to me that I can see.
I literally just looked this up and thus far it's been working pretty well. Who knows maybe it will keep safari at bay and maybe not i've only been using it for about an hour with farily good results
http://mytech.dsa.me/en/2011/08/27/safari-5-1-memory-leak-solve/
Right now Safari 5.1.2 is using 4GB+ VM for one tab and has multiplied my swapfiles to 9. This is only a few hours since I deleted swapfiles with AppleJack. It's a disaster.
Early 2008 iMac, 4GB RAM, Snow Leopard 10.6.8
Safari's web content is also taking all my memory, notice the top line, 5.82 GB used!
I've just relaunched Safari in 32-bit mode. I shall watch what happens with great interest!
tlehmann (vmware)
May I ask why you think this a memory leak?
Actually it's not a memory leak like the classic M$ Office leaks - it's not particularly about Safari retaining RAM after quit - it's Safari taking grandiloquent amounts of (real) RAM to do perfectly light tasks which other browsers - including past versions of Safari itself - do with reasonable amounts of RAM. For me particularly, Safari (specifically Safari Web Content) takes more RAM than I've ever seen any app take, and an unreasonable amount of it too. There is something wrong with it which could be as simple as one stupid mistake in one line of code. It's got so bad that I've now moved from my favourite browser to Opera and will stay there until a really different and fixed version of Safari is released.
What is the proper name for this bug anyway?
Memory leak not fixed in 5.1.2
